Archive for January, 2006

I haven’t posted here in some time due to personal busy-ness and other things going on. That however does not mean I haven’t been keeping up with the wonderful hobby of home winemaking.

I’ve started some melomels recently, and I’ll have more on that when I have more time to blog about them!

Thanks for dropping by even though the postings recently have been few and far between.

The other day, I overfilled a 3 gallon carboy after racking from a primary. My housemate happened to walk in while I was gently dipping my wine thief into the carboy, trying carefully to not overflow the liquid. She watched me as I did this several times, each time, drawing a very small amount of wine from the carboy.

Wendy then said, “Ian, wouldn’t you be better off using a turkey baster?”

Holy smokes… I went and sanitized the turkey baster and did what I wanted to do in mere seconds. Furthermore, I realized that a turkey baster is much handier for drawing liquid from the carboy for any activity that a wine thief would be used. Just squeeze the bulb on top, put the end of the baster in, release the bulb, and wine gets sucked up much faster than using a thief. As well, it doesn’t drip as much at the bottom end either, after drawing it out of the wine.

Try it yourself sometime.

Any readers familiar with a strain of yeast named “BK-1″ and distributed by Rudolf Keller SRL? This yeast came with the Advintage Celebration Kit I started. After 11 days, the fermentation seems to be progressing quite slowly, with the SG at 1.020. There is still fermentation activity going on, but after 11 days, I would have expected it to be just about complete by now. Or at least much further along then it is.

I’m curious if anyone else has experience with BK 1 yeast, and whether they found it slow?

Most home winemakers use food grade plastic pails for primary fermentation. The ones that are available at the winemaking store I frequent are all 23 litre pails. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a variety of sizes for your primary fermentation vessels?

Well, I mentioned this to my ex-wife who is a food service supervisor at a cafeteria. She told me that many of her food deliveries were in food grade plastic pails which came in a variety of sizes. Once the food was empty, the pails would end up in the recycling blue box. I asked her if she would set aside some for me, and now I’ve got several pails that are about 3 gallon capacity, some 2 gallons, and a couple that are just over 1 gallon in capacity.

These are great for those batches of wine that you’re making in smaller quantities. If you know anyone in the food service industy, you might want to ask them if they get food deliveries in pails, and if so, if they could put some aside for you.

Make sure you have them save the lids as well.

I wonder if grocery stores might have spare plastic pails as well that they might keep for you instead of putting out to the trash or recycling curb.

If kiwi fruit are on sale at your local grocer, you might want to give this a try. A kiwi melomel, or perhaps more descriptively, a fruit mead.

This is my first melomel of the year with part of the 90 pounds of honey I recently had delivered. Of course, I’ll be making even more melomels and meads with the honey, and hopefully will have time in the next week or so to get them started.

A couple of other notes – I meant to write about two Christmas gifts that I received. My business partner, Wendy, is awesome at finding unique and great presents and this year was no exception. She knows I love to read, and the first gift was the book, “The Heartbreak Grape: A Journey in Search of the Perfect Pino Noir”. I’m looking forward to reading this book which was short listed for the Canadian Governor General’s award, as well as nominated for the James Beard Book award. I’ll provide a review when I’m finished reading it.

The other gift from Wendy was exquisite. Somehow, she managed to find a dozen hand-blown (mouth blown? I don’t know the proper term) glass airlocks, each about 6″ high. Apparently at least 40 years old, these airlocks are really nice, and I’m looking forward to using them. Of course, I’ll be using them with carboys that are mostly out of reach when long term ageing is desired, so there is little risk of breaking them. What a great Christmas present!

A few more sips of my wine, and I’m off to bed.

I enjoyed a wonderful New Year’s Eve, sharing it with some of the most special people in my life, including my almost 14 year old son Colin, my 3 1/2 year old son David, and my business partner, Wendy. Why bother to try to make something special happen, when the company is already special regardless of what you’re doing? We all could have gone out and done something, while shivering our butts off in the cold weather, but instead, we simply stayed home, watched the Toronto Maple Leafs massacre New Jersey as David, in his cute 3 1/2 year old voice practiced his “Go Leafs Go” over and over.

My computer clock, being wrong, I helped everyone bring in the New Year about ten minutes early. Ten minutes early meant sipping on Chateau-Neuf wine before we had planned, but enjoying it anyhow. When we realized my clock was off, we just figured that our previous countdown was a good rehearsal for the real thing, but I don’t think any of us actually felt any different when we did cross into 2006 for real, ten minutes later.

After some hugs and kisses, and clinking of glasses, we were all wide awake, and David decided he wanted to keep on playing with his brother David, and I decided I wanted to tend to my home winery. I racked some wines, and started a new one – Borolo from an “Advintage” kit that I’ve started to review here, as well, started a review on a Festa Juice Merlot “sort of kit.”

In the meantime, I’m enjoying some wine I bottled a month ago.. realizing it is now almost 6 AM, and I should get some sleep.

I hope you had a New Year that you’ll remember for along time to come, and perhaps discovered some good wine as well. There was no Champagne here… I personally think all Champagne is way over rated as far as personal enjoyment goes.

But whatever.. hope your celebrations were awesome and memorable as mine will be!